PARTY ANIMALS

Setting: high-level politics. He: “I headed issues. I was a lawyer.” She: “I’m a performance artist.”

At the start of Cock-a-doodle-doo, Philip Weiss’ smart first novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 295 pages; $21), he–Jack Gold–has just finished working on an underdog’s losing campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor of New York. The winner is popular Early Quinlan, who had been Secretary of State in a Republican Administration but, when times changed, switched parties with speed and grace.

She is Early’s daughter–handsome, flaky Burry (short for Berenice)–who, like her father, is totally corrupt. She is good at dancing on tables and at rather taxing bouts of sex. She and her fancy Manhattan friends, “a club of frauds who think they are the center of the universe,” love that sort of thing. Jack, a dogged public-interest lawyer, falls hard for Burry. Before long he is doing dirty tricks for Early’s henchmen and bungling them: he snaps a photo of an opponent’s “mistress” who turns out to be his sister. At the time Jack’s only thought was that the man could have done a lot better.

That assessment about sums up the cynicism of Cock-a-doodle-doo. Unlike the hero of Robert Penn Warren’s political classic, All the King’s Men, Jack is for sale almost at once. Weiss tells much of his thirtysomething story through party scenes, and he easily passes a tricky test of fiction writing: displaying a sharp sense of when to start a sequence roiling, when to let his party sizzle and when to cut away from it.

Eventually, he may learn to apply this editing skill to the excesses that mar the novel–a rich attachment to vulgarity, including a deadening level of profanity and a comically exaggerated preoccupation with smells. Clearly, Weiss wants the reader to accept Burry as a fatal temptress. But it does not help to be told early on that her aroma is “part B.O. and maybe patchouli.”